Aims and Scope

Statistics, Politics, and Policy studies the ways that statistical analysis drives public policy decisions, and publishes significant research on the application of statistical ideas to problems that relate to policy implementation.

The increasing amount and complexity of available data is constantly creating new challenges for statistical thinking in policy problems. While many academic statisticians tend to share among themselves their latest methods and models, less attention has been paid to the usefulness of those statistical methods and models to inform public policy decisions, and what statistical approaches might be most effective in designing how policies are implemented. In the policy sphere, statistical methods are sometimes taken as a given, with less attention to all the variations, assumptions, and effects of different methods in differing contexts. But it is in the policy sphere that statistical debates can have the great value and impact, and the intersection of statistics and public policy is a fertile ground for statistical research and analysis to address important policy issues that may have widespread ramifications.

As an electronic journal, Statistics, Politics, and Policy will use a mix of voices and approaches to reach a broad audience. The journal aims to open avenues of communication between statisticians and policy makers on questions that pique the interest of the public. The journal will appeal to statisticians, policy analysts, and anyone interested in the implicit yet powerful ways that statistical thinking influences decisions that affect many aspects of public life.

Statistics, Politics, and Policy will publish applied research articles that explore the implications of statistical thinking and methods applied to public policy issues. The journal will also publish engaging commentary pieces and innovative policy ideas on the public issues of the day where statistics plays, or ought to play, a role.

For papers on applied statistical research, the focus should be on the relevant statistical issues, with a succinct description of the policy issue being addressed. The range of topics is wide and will include areas such as educational testing and policy, energy and environmental policy including demography and climate change, public finance, history and review of statistical ideas applied to public policy controversies, taxation and business policy, justice, crime and forensic analyses, health policy including health care finance, drug development, approval and monitoring, politics, sociological policy analyses, statistical methodology including study design and causal inference, and survey methods. In all the areas noted above, the primary objective of the journal will be to highlight the use of innovative statistical methodology in order to elucidate and resolve important public policy issues.

Papers for the commentary and ideas section are short, ideally 600-2000 words, and are intended to be of general interest and readability. That is, they should contain deeper analysis than is found on the Op-Ed page of The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times, but to be of comparable interest the Statistics, Politics, and Policy readership. Readers include professional statisticians and statistically trained professionals from fields including epidemiology, education, economics, law, and policy analysis. Letters to the editor are encouraged and may comment on any column or letter. Letters must be less than 300 words.

Supplementary Information

Statistics, Politics, and Policy (SPP) studies the ways in which statistical analysis drives public policy decisions, and publishes significant research on the application of statistical ideas to problems that relate to policy implementation. In addition to applied research articles, the peer-reviewed journal includes timely and engaging commentaries about public issues where statistics plays a role. The journal will appeal to statisticians, policy analysts, and anyone interested in the implicit yet powerful ways that statistical thinking influences decisions that affect many aspects of public life. Editors come from highly regarded statistics and public policy programs such as UC Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, Duke, Harvard, and the University of Southern California.

Instructions for Authors

MANUSCRIPT PREPARATION GUIDELINES

This document provides authors with details on policy, copyediting, formatting, and layout requirements pertaining to final manuscript submission to this journal. All manuscripts must have correct formatting to be considered ready for publication. The entire manuscript submission and review process is handled through an online system named ScholarOne. All manuscripts should be submitted to http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/dgspp

EDITORIAL POLICY

Unpublished material: Submission of a manuscript implies that the work described is not copyrighted, published or submitted elsewhere, except in abstract form. The corresponding author should ensure that all authors approve the manuscript before its submission.

Ethical conduct of research: The authors must describe and confirm safeguards to meet ethical standards.Conflict of interest: When authors submit a manuscript, they are responsible for recognizing and disclosing financial and/or other conflicts of interest that might bias their work and/or could inappropriately influence his/her judgment. If no specified acknowledgement is given, the Publishers assume that no conflict of interest exists.

Copyright: Manuscripts are accepted on condition of transfer of copyright (for U.S. government employees: to the extent transferable) to Statistics, Politics and Policy. Once the manuscript is accepted, it may not be published elsewhere without the consent of the copyright holders.

Authors are strongly encouraged to contribute the computer code and data that are the basis for their paper to an online repository maintained by De Gruyter.

COPYEDITING/LANGUAGE EDITINGThe ScholarOne system has been designed to improve the scholarly publication process for authors. Among the many improvements we offer over traditional journals, the most significant is that we have dramatically shortened the period between the initial submission and the final publication of a peer-reviewed article. Much of this time savings is due to the innovative use of electronic publication. These innovations, however, require certain changes in the way authors need to prepare accepted manuscripts for electronic publication.

De Gruyter does provide a light copyedit of manuscripts for this journal, but remain responsible for being their own copyeditors.

LANGUAGE EDITINGAll manuscripts must be written in clear and concise English. If you have reasons to doubt your proficiency with respect to spelling, grammar, etc. (e.g., because English is not your native language), then you may wish to employ—at your expense—the services of a professional language editor.Please get in touch with the Language Editors directly to discuss details. • Alexandra Griswolddralex321@gmail.com Areas of expertise: public policy, political science, education, economics, social sciences, humanities, ethics • Cyndy Brownbrowncyndy@yahoo.com Areas of expertise: political science, social sciences, humanities, ethics • Donna Reeder Reeder Literary Services Areas of expertise: political science, economics, mathematical economics, natural sciences, social sciences, technology, law, humanities, liberal arts, literary studies, health and medicine • Dorothy Scheppsdschepps2@gmail.com Areas of expertise: political science, emergency management, homeland security, community/land use planning, law, economics, cyber terrorism, and cyber security • Jane Cotnoirjane.cotnoir@gmail.com Areas of expertise: Local government management, international crime and terrorism, emergency/disaster management, humanities, social science • Patience Kramerpatience.kramer@att.net Areas of expertise: Health and Medicine (CAM and drug policy and analysis), Economics and Business (with a focus on marketing) • Steve Peterspeter@mac.com Areas of expertise: LaTeX, Linguistics, economics, mathematics

CONTENT AND STRUCTURE• Manuscripts should be submitted as Word, docx, rtf, or LaTex files • If your manuscript contains special characters, equations, etc. please make sure to also supply a PDF version as a reference file. This will be used to ensure any formatting issues introduced during the submission process can be corrected accurately.• Write your article in English • Use the following document structure: 1. Introduction (titling this section is optional) 2. Subsequent sections which include tables, references to figures and figure captions. 3. Appendices (if any). 4. References - Include a proper bibliography following the guidelines used by the Journal of the American Statistical Association. See the References section below for further details. 5. Please upload figures as separate files (necessary for proper typesetting), and also include them either in-text or at the end of the article with figure callouts (e.g. ‘Fig. 2’) in the appropriate places in the text. Please see the “Tables, Figures, and Graphs” section below for more detailed instructions regarding figure submission.

BOOK REVIEWS• Book reviews must start with the citation of the book at the top of the first page.

FONTS• Only use Unicode fonts (e.g. Times New Roman, Arial). Times New Roman preferred as the primary font.

COLORED TEXT• Set the font color to black for the majority of the text. De Gruyter encourages authors to take advantage of the ability to use color in the production of figures, maps, images, and graphs. However, you need to appreciate that this will cause some of your readers problems when they print the document on a black and white printer. For this reason, you are advised to avoid the use of colors in situations where their translation to black and white would render the material illegible or incomprehensible.

EMPHASIZED TEXT, TITLES, AND FOREIGN TERMS• To indicate text you wish to emphasize, use italics rather than underlining. The use of color to emphasize text is discouraged.• Foreign terms should be set in italics rather than underlined.• Titles of books, movies, etc., should be set in italics rather than underlined.

ABBREVIATIONSThe use of abbreviations and acronyms is permitted provided they are defined the first time they are used.

HEADINGSHeadings (e.g., title of sections) should be distinguished from the main body text:• Clearly indicate the heading hierarchy.• Be consistent in whether or not you use headline case, or you capitalize the first word and leave the rest in lower-case.

FOOTNOTES• Footnotes strongly discouraged.

TABLES, FIGURES & GRAPHS• General requirements: All illustrations must be of reproduction-ready quality and in EPS, TIF, or JPG format. They will be reduced in size to fit, whenever possible, the width of a single column. Lettering of all figures within the article should be uniform in style (preferably a sans serif typeface like Helvetica) and of sufficient size (ca. 8 pt.).Uppercase letters A, B, C, etc. should be used to identify parts of multi-part figures. Cite all figures in the text in numerical order. Indicate the approximate placement of each figure. For typesetting purposes, figures must be submitted as separate image files as well as placed in-text or pasted at the end of the manuscript with approprite callouts (e.g. Fig. 2) in the article. Only figures (graphs, line drawings, photographs, etc) should be labeled as ‘figures’, not tables or equations.• Halftone figures (grayscale and color) should have a minimum resolution of 300 dpi and be of good contrast. Authors are welcome to submit color illustrations. De Gruyter is happy to publish color images free of charge

• Line drawings must be of reproduction-ready quality. Please note that faint shading may be lost upon reproduction. When drawing bar graphs, use patterning instead of grey scales. Lettering of all figures should be uniform in style. A resolution of 1200 dpi is recommended.• Figure legends: Provide a short descriptive title and a legend to make each figure self-explanatory on separate pages. Explain all symbols used in the figures. Remember to use the same abbreviations as in the text body. • Permissions: It is the authors’ responsibility to obtain permission to reproduce original or modified material that has been previously published. Any permissions fees are the responsibility of the author(s). • Offprints: The electronic files of typeset articles in Adobe Acrobat PDF format are provided free of charge; corresponding authors receive notification that their article has been published online. Paper offprints can be ordered in addition; an offprint order form will accompany the page proofs and should be completed and returned with the corrected proofs immediately.• Please upload figures as separate files, and include them either in-text or pasted at the end of the article, with appropriate figure callouts (e.g. ‘Fig. 2’) in the article. • Number tables consecutively using Arabic numerals. Tables should appear in the document near where they are referenced in the text. Provide a short descriptive title, column headings, and (if necessary) footnotes to make each table self-explanatory. Refer to tables in the text as Table 1, 2 etc. Use Table 1, etc. in the table legends.• Tables must not be displayed as images.

MATHEMATICS AND EQUATIONS• Roman letters used in mathematical expressions as variables must be italicized. Roman letters used as part of multi-letter function names should not be italicized. Subscripts and superscripts must be a smaller font size than the main text.• Type short mathematical expressions inline.• Longer expressions must appear as display math, as must expressions using many different levels (e.g., such as fractions).• Ensure that Equations are typed or created with a plug-in, such as Word Formula Editor or MathType. Mathematical expressions must not be displayed as images• Important definitions or concepts can also be set off as display math.• Number your equations sequentially.• Insert a blank line before and after each equation.• Place equation numbers are on the right .• When proofing your document, pay particular attention to the rendering of the mathematics, especially symbols and notation drawn from other-than-standard fonts.